From our MD – Stephen K

We stay well out of Politics here at Big Wet Fish and the support office like the country would be pretty much equally split over the Leave / Remain Camps.  I thought I’d take a few moments on this historic day to explain how BREXIT affects us here at Big Wet Fish.  The reality is that it is pretty much business as usual.  However I wanted to let you know how we (and some clients) have been or will be affected by BREXIT

What happened the morning after the Referendum Vote
The British Pound lost a lot of value against the US Dollar and Euro Currencies and this directly impacted our bottom line.  Domain Names, cPanel Licenses, Spam Filtering Licenses and a bunch of other suppliers invoice us in US Dollars and Euros.  Although it has recovered slightly (it’s still a lot weaker than before the vote) we were and still are worse off as a company.   Some domain name prices were increased to compensate for the poor exchange rate but we kept cPanel licenses the same cost for clients until June 2020 when cPanel themselves forced our hand with significant price rises.

EU Data Centre Hosting
As a business we have in recent years won some web hosting tenders from companies in the Republic of Ireland.  Given our proximity to the Border and the fact Dublin is 2 hours by road that’s to be expected.  One such ROI Government Tender stated specifically in the tender document that the servers we provide must be located in a European Union Data Centre. We’ve had to move these servers in order to keep this client’s contract active.  If for any contractural reason you need to move your web hosting from the UK to an EU Country we are here to help with a cost effective solution.

GDPR and Data Protection
It’s business as usual.  The government has stated that the UK Data Protection Act 2018 will remain in place even in the event of a hard Brexit and the EU Withdrawal Act would incorporate the GDPR into UK law to sit alongside it.  Therefore clients who currently host in our UK data racks can remain confident that similar levels of data protection will remain in place.

.EU Domain Names
We’ve been selling .EU domain names for years and have a number of these registered.  Unfortunately the EU have not allowed ‘Grandfather’ rights for the use of the .EU Domain Name.  This means that if you use a .EU domain and it is registered to a United Kingdom postal address this domain will stop working sometime around October 2020.  You need to make plans now to either change your domain name or you need to change your address to one in the EU.